Chocolate Healthfood Of The Gods

A few years ago the mounting scientific evidence attesting to the health benefits of pure chocolate began to be made known to the general public. Books, magazine articles, and television guest appearances by experts on chocolate science have steadily convinced us that chocolate can be healthy. This book details the lore, legend, and medical truths now known to science, as seen from the perspective of a physician, revealing how and why pure chocolate is wholesome and healthy. It reviews the many and often surprising health benefits of eating chocolate. It augments the facts with references to the scientific research for each major topic. This practical guide to the uses of chocolate as a health food will serve a valuable resource for everyone who wants to "have their cake and eat it too" - who wish to enjoy the seemingly sinful pleasures of dining on chocolate while simultaneously improving their health and well-being.

Dive into a book loaded with the mystical lore of chocolate as well as all of the latest exciting and intriguing research you need to know about why you should eat more chocolate. Includes over 60 recipes for soups, salads, starters, main courses and, of course, desserts! This book deftly covers the highly compelling and extensive scientific and clinical research conducted on the myriad health benefits of cocoa and chocolate. Linda Woolven and Ted Snider's many years of experience as herbalists and natural medicine researchers provide an excellent window on the past decades of advances in science that make cocoa and chocolate health foods.This book covers documentation supporting the many positive cardiovascular benefits and even cognitive reasons why all of us should eat more cocoa and chocolate on a regular basis. - Mark Blumenthal Founder and Executive Director, American Botanical Council

Chocolate has been one of mankind's obsessions for centuries. The history of cacao and chocolate-making leads from Mexico to Spain and then France, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium, while its consumption is universal. This collection examines chocolate's history as well as its use in literature, art, music, and folklore, as a subject for psychology and childrearing, and as an important product for business. In addition, recipes for novel and tasty uses of chocolate are provided. While chocolate may be seen as food of the gods, it is consumed around the world by all ages and classes. This is an intriguing book for scholars in many fields and for those interested in the history of food and their favorite sweet.

The Mesoamerican population who lived near the indigenous cultivation sites of the "Chocolate Tree" (Theobromo cacao) had a multitude of documented applications of chocolate as medicine, ranging from alleviating fatigue to preventing heart ailments to treating snakebite. Until recently, these applications have received little sound scientific scrutiny. Rather, it has been the reputed health claims stemming from Europe and the United States which have attracted considerable biomedical attention. This book, for the first time, describes the centuries-long quest to uncover chocolate's potential health benefits. The authors explore variations in the types of evidence used to support chocolate's use as medicine as well as note the ongoing tension over categorizing chocolate as food or medicine, and more recently, as functional food or nutraceutical. The authors, Wilson an historian of science and medicine, and Hurst an analytical chemist in the chocolate industry, bring their collective insights to bear upon the development of ideas and practices surrounding the use of chocolate as medicine. Chocolate's use in this manner is explored first among the Mesoamerican peoples, then as it is transported to Europe, and back into Colonial North America. The authors then focus upon more recent bioscience experimental undertakings which have been aimed to ascertain both long-standing and novel suggestions as to chocolate's efficacy as a medicinal and a nutritional substance. Chocolate/s reputation as the most craved food boosts this book's appeal to food and biomedical scientists, cacao researchers, ethnobotanists, historians, folklorists, and healers of all types as well as to the general reading audience.

"The worst thing about food science, the elephant in the room, is that it's not just the opinions that are changing—but the 'facts' themselves shift too." Did you know that the great philosophers were the original foodies? To eat or not to eat? That’s an easy question to answer. But what to eat? That’s a deep and profoundly difficult one. Doctors and nutritionists often disagree with each other, while celebrities and scientists keep pitching us new recipes and special diets. No one thought to ask the philosophers—those rational souls devoted to truth, ethics, and reason—what they think. Until now.

This heavily illustrated book focuses on the nature, cultivation, manufacture, history and varieties of chocolate. The chapter on chocolate history is particularly helpful in its detailed and well-documented account of the introduction of cocoa to England. It includes a discussion of the early cocoa houses (the "forerunners of ... modern clubs").?The reader is also treated to a tour of a 'modern' chocolate factory, which provides interesting insight into the working conditions of factory girls. In 1903, this included a 48-hour work week and mandatory school lessons for the younger girls.